Migrants in the midst of city life: spatial patterns and arrival logics of foreign newcomers to Brussels in 1880

Abstract

The spatial situation of foreign migrants in nineteenth-century cities has been studied mainly in static terms and has by and large focused on cases in the Anglophone world. This has yielded an image of concentration and segregation of foreign migrants in particular neighbourhoods. Little is known, however, about the spatial situation of foreign migrants in western European cities, and about how a dynamic approach may open up the way we think about nineteenth-century cities. This paper explores the spatial implications of the inherently dynamic process of foreign migration to western European cities. It does so by investigating the places of arrival of foreign newcomers to Brussels, using the registration files of all foreigners who arrived in Brussels in 1880. The visualisation and analysis of these data with a historical geographical information system (HGIS) shows that in contrast to what the Anglophone literature suggests, spatial concentrations based on foreign newcomers’ origins or class were absent. Instead, foreign newcomers mainly arrived centrally and dispersed according to workplace bound, accommodation related and event induced arrival logics. These arrival logics were expressed spatially in small scale, heterogeneous and more or less temporary ‘arrival spaces’. Foreign newcomers in Brussels in the nineteenth century should thus not be imagined in isolated migrant neighbourhoods, but as an integral part of the city, and as actively shaping and producing the city and its everyday life.